User-Generated Difficulty, Part Two

Because competitive multiplayer was left out of the first installment, popular feedback suggested it deserves some focus in this follow-up. An indie perspective on competitive multiplayer UGD is Dungeon Defenders’ (Trendy Entertainment, 2009) frequently overlooked PvP gameplay. The indie title famous for combining tower defense and role-playing generally focuses on having players work together to defeat endless waves of enemies or powerful bosses, however at the end of the day they may want to fight one another. The simplicity of this PvP system is that different players don’t need to match levels, gear quality, or any sort of regulatory statistics to enter the arena. This allows any type of player to form any sort of battle scenario and maximizes the replayability of what appears to be a very simple and straightforward experience. Unlike World of Warcraft’s Arena PvP, a highly regulated and mechanical experience, the independent and casual setting of Dungeon Defenders allows serious players to fight for glory or more casual players fight for practice (note: while I acknowledge the presence of AI-controlled enemies in Dungeon Defenders’ PvP, but I do not see them as a significant element of PvP gameplay as they serve little purpose other than a distraction). However for these examples I would not exactly call them UGD, but a subset of UGD driven by external players, or to simply put it, competitive multiplayer. At least for simplicity’s sake, the concept of UGD should be a somewhat one-to-one relationship between a single player and single game environment.

To address the one-to-one-connection in UGD, one should look at Waves (Squid in a Box, 2012), a twin-stick shooter where the player is rewarded differently based on their playing style. When the player actively shoots at incoming enemies they receive rewards at a normal rate, and if they feel particularly daring, they can wait for enemies to get dangerously close before shooting them for bonus points. On the flip side, if the player wants to play more casually they can refrain from actively wiping out enemies to reduce spawn rates (spawn rates are also slightly reduced if the player is dying frequently). This even trade-off of benefits and setbacks for unique playing styles is an important concept in of itself and makes an important point about game design that caters towards player variability rather than specific developer design. While the game follows a specific set of rules (as all games do), it caters to nearly every type of approach within its own rule set, providing dynamic feedback to different player styles. This possibly opens a Pandora’s Box of if effective UGD falls on the player or designer at the end of the day, since arguments could be made for either.

Even trade-offs are crucial to a successful UGD-based experience. In an effective implementation of UGD, no player should be punished for playing in a particular style (unless of course the style breaks the game). There must be even trade-offs to make different playing styles yield unique experiences, but the experiences must have exclusive, appealing factors or else players will never want to experiment in their playing style (or players who naturally play in that style will feel rejected by the game). A good implementation of this in a AAA title is Demon’s Souls (From Software, 2009) and World Tendency. When players play poorly or perform actions that negatively affect other players, their world leans to Black World Tendency. This results in more difficult enemies that drop more and better items. When a player performs good deeds for other players and/or doesn’t die frequently, enemies are easier to kill but drop fewer items. From larger studios, this is one of the best implementations of dynamically changing difficulty based on player actions and decisions, and despite potentially involving other players (going against the previous one-to-one concept), still falls under UGD as involving other players is not crucial to dynamically changing the difficulty. The one caveat is that Demon’s Souls is a notoriously difficult game, and gamers seeking a more casual playthrough may inadvertently create an even more challenging experience through numerous deaths, discouraging (and punishing) their natural approach.

It’s clear that no concrete conclusions can be drawn from only two (relatively) short posts, but at very least this will change the way you look at how difficulty is handled in games at indie and AAA levels. How should a game handle different skill levels? Should the player make conscious decisions to challenge themselves or should the game do it for them, and if so, to what extent? Where does difficulty fall in regards to fun? If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment below, or better yet write a post of your own!

Finally, I’d like to thank Reddit’s r/truegaming for a fantastic response and informative feedback, especially users: man_after_midnight, SecondTalon, foogles, PixelPaws, Forever_Awkward, SartreIsSmartre, and Warskull.